


something I want to hear

by cuneifire (orphan_account)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Season/Series 02, The Family Business, lying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-15
Updated: 2018-12-15
Packaged: 2019-09-18 13:31:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16995921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/cuneifire
Summary: He admires his brother's ability to lie.





	something I want to hear

He watches Dean walk through the building, flashing his FBI pass at any one curious enough to ask, swagger in his step and what Sam knows is most definitively a cocky smile on his face. His brother taught him a long time ago that if you act enough like you are something, people are bound to believe you.

It’s not that he doesn’t think that statement is true. He’s seen is, proven over and over again, time after time. A good amount of his family’s business is owed to that pretty little fact right there.

So no. It’s not that he doesn’t believe lying works.

It’s just that sometimes he wishes it didn’t.

.

When Sam was a kid, he had a problem with honesty.

Told his teacher his dad hunted monsters for a living, and that his brother had gotten a scar from it. Next day they were booking it out of town, halfway though the next state with Dad yelling frantically from the front seat, Sam curled up in the back, wide eyed and staring at his stoic faced brother.

A handful of years later he’d walked in with a myriad of bruises on his arms, from sparring Dean, always pushing himself just a bit too far, see if maybe, just this once, he could beat his brother (he didn’t). A girl in his class looked at him funny, but it wasn’t ‘til her gaze flickered downwards that he realised what she was looking at. She took enough of a half step towards him, asked if he was okay.

He thought about doing it. About telling her some false white lie, telling her something other than the truth. Tell her what she wanted to hear.

He couldn’t bring himself to. Instead, he just stood there, deer-caught-in-the-headlights silence, until the bell rung and he ran like it was a wendigo and not a concerned civilian.

They were out of town the day after that, too. Dad cursing in the front and Dean sending disguised worried looks back and forth between the two of them. Sam had almost wanted to apologize.

He hadn’t. That had maybe been where it all started.

.

Stanford was hell. Not the textbooks, not the schoolwork- no, that was paradise. Everything about the university was- good, fine,  _normal._ It was Sam’s stupid past- the ghost that never seemed to let him go- that was hell.

“What about your parents?” Jess had asked him once, and he’d done that again, frozen up, not lying but not telling the truth either.

“What did your dad do for a living?”

“Why do you know how to shoot a gun?”

He never told her any of it. And she was lovely enough that he didn’t mind. He told himself that one day he would tell her, that indeed there would be time.

There wasn’t.

.

So here he is, watching Dean lie like it’s his birthright, and maybe it is; maybe Sam’s brand of still honesty is truly the closest thing a Winchester can get to the truth.

Or maybe it’s not. Because it’s a handful of hours later and they’re both a few shots in and it occurs to Sam that Dean is terrible at lying to him, that Sam can read him like a book. Always could. So maybe it’s just people he doesn’t know. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t worry so much, if there’s only two people in the world who know what his brother really is, and one of them’s dead.

Sam wonders, gaze askew over the fading light somewhere off in the distance, warm and forgiving. He wonders if he could ever really tell the truth. Wonders if it’d do him any good.  

Wonders if his brother knows that Sam sees right through him.


End file.
